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Digital skills are essential for engaging in employment, healthcare, education, and government services. However, the digital divide remains a social inequality, especially among marginalized populations. Through a community-engaged research approach, we conducted a digital skills learning intervention in a U.S. public housing community, where residents frequently face socioeconomic challenges and limited access to digital resources. Public housing is a community seldom explored in CSCW and HCI research and provides a unique context to study the ongoing digital skills gap. Through the lens of situated learning theory, we study how sociocultural factors impact the efficacy of a community-based computer skills learning intervention. Specifically, we examine how the public housing community organized various resources---online learning materials, instructors, peer social support, and on-the-job learning opportunities---for digital skills development. Notably, the training leveraged instructor critical care and peer support to develop a learning community between residents and leaders of the community NGO that continued beyond the formalized training program. We contribute to CSCW and HCI work on collective and assets-based approaches to enhancing digital capacity. Our work provides implications for building collective grassroots digital skills learning infrastructure that could create new digitally-engaged employment opportunities.
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This content will become publicly available on May 2, 2026
The Development of a New Measure of Collective Digital Literacy
This article theorizes and proposes a novel construct,community digital capacity, to measure collective digital capacity at a community level. Community digital capacity is the extent to which the culture, infrastructure, and digital competence of family and community enable and support digital practices. We address a critical gap in individual digital literacy assessments and address limitations with existing theories that do not show digital inequities in the context of underlying systemic and structural challenges posed by one's social position. Building on insights from Computer Supportive Cooperative Work and Social Computing and Human-Computer Interaction for Development communities, we recognize that digital training initiatives must shift toward critical cultural and social practices that encourage full participation in community affairs. Accordingly, we created 28 items covering three domains---individual, social, and infrastructure. We conducted cognitive interviews with a public housing community to refine the items and capture the construct fully. We assessed their factor structure in two Southeastern Michigan cohorts. After dropping eight items based on contribution to Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR), the public housing residents exhibit a two-factor structure (SRMR=0.09) consisting of nearly independent factors for the individual and social domains, with all items loading positively on their respective domain. We contribute an initial measure for researchers and practitioners to assess community members' access to shared digital resources and support, offering a tool to assess broader social and structural factors contributing to the digital divide.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2125012
- PAR ID:
- 10654737
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proc of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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